Conversations between partners
by Bookjunk
Summary: A series of short, but revealing conversations. Rhonda Boney/Jim Gilpin
1. Intuition

**Conversations between partners**

**Chapter 1: Intuition**

The old one-two went off without a hitch. Rhonda led and Jim followed smoothly. They were experts at this game and Nick Dunne was a novice. This time, however, Jim felt a lingering sense of doubt about the reality they'd created. Did most married couples know each other's blood type? He waited until Dunne had left the room before voicing the question.

'Should I know my wife's blood type?'

'No,' Rhonda scoffed. She shook her head, clearly amused. Relieved, Jim leaned back in his chair. He didn't even know his own blood type; let alone Tiffany's.

'Should I have sensed that?' Jim suggested. Usually, he could tell when Rhonda was playing people. She did that all the time. He should have known that she had just been making stuff up and passing it off as normal behaviour to rattle Dunne.

'You know, like a good partner would've?' he added.

'You _are_ a good partner,' Rhonda replied, without looking up.


	2. Have a little faith in me

**Conversations between partners**

**Chapter 2: Have a little faith in me**

His shoes were making a quiet but unmistakably crunchy noise. Jim suspected he'd stepped in some of Dunne's temper tantrum. He steadied himself against the car to check. Yes, tiny pieces of smashed glass were embedded in the soles of his shoes. He sighed and opened the car door.

'I want to talk about what just happened,' Rhonda stated as he slid into his seat. He immediately knew what she wanted to talk about. Not about Dunne's outburst, but about his own purely instinctive reaction to defend her.

'He was yelling at you,' he said. 'It was unacceptable. No one gets to talk to you that way.'

She looked past him at the house where Dunne had – in all likelihood – murdered his wife. She didn't say anything. She simply waited until he got there on his own.

'I'm sorry. It seemed like the kind of patriarchal bullshit he'd go for,' Jim explained. It _did _seem like the sort of bogus sentiment a man like Dunne would understand and respond to, but that had been the farthest thing from Jim's mind at that moment. Instead, he'd felt anger on Rhonda's behalf when Dunne had exploded and hurled the glass at the floor.

'Patriarchal bullshit?' Rhonda repeated, raising an eyebrow.

'What? Guys can be feminists too,' he protested.

'Are you saying that you are one? You have the most traditional marriage I've ever seen.'

'Does that disqualify me? Tiffany likes to take care of me.'

'Really? She likes vacuuming, ironing, folding the laundry?'

'She does!' Jim insisted, pausing briefly. 'Well, either that or she's heavily medicated.'

Rhonda laughed before becoming serious again. She leaned closer. Her voice was calm but firm.

'I don't need you to step in, Gil.'

'I know. Look, you're sensitive about this kind of stuff, like anyone who's had to put up with this crap would be. But I'm telling you: I didn't mean anything by it. I just reacted. It has nothing to do with you being a woman. It's a partner thing. Male or female. It doesn't matter. No one gets to talk to you like that. Okay?' he asked.

Rhonda stared at him for a long hard moment. He tried to gauge her mood, but her face was inscrutable. Eventually, she nodded thoughtfully and turned away.

'Okay.'


	3. Thump, thump

**Conversations between partners**

**Chapter 3: Thump, thump**

Jim ruffled his hair and frowned at his reflection in the dark TV screen. Behind him, Rhonda snorted. He ignored that and gestured at his hair.

'Does it look okay to you?'

'I like the way you part your hair. Makes you look like a boy scout,' she answered. Unsure, Jim considered himself.

'Is that a good thing? It doesn't sound like a good thing.'

Rhonda shrugged.

'You're adorable. I'm scary. It works,' she coolly said. She wasn't looking at him. She never really looked at him when she said things like that. It was something Jim had noticed. He hadn't figured out yet whether that meant nothing or everything. Adorable, though… That was not just your regular compliment.

'Adorable?'

'Nonthreatening, safe, nice,' Rhonda rattled off, again without sparing him so much as a glance. Not particularly flattering words. Even 'nice' wasn't a compliment anymore. These days nice guys weren't nice guys so much as assholes in disguise. Rhonda saw the gloomy expression on his face.

'Likeable,' she amended, catching his eye. 'See you tomorrow.'

Jim nodded and watched her leave. Rhonda thinks I'm likeable, he thought. Rhonda likes me, he deduced. The thought made his throat tighten and his heart rate speed up.


	4. Perfectly clear

**Conversations between partners**

**Chapter 4: Perfectly clear**

Tiffany hummed while putting away the groceries. She hummed while loading the dishwasher. She hummed while cleaning the toilet.

She was always humming. Which meant that she enjoyed housework, right? You don't hum when you don't enjoy what you're doing. Was there such a thing as glum humming? Jim thought not. As far as he knew there was only happy humming.

Jim waited at the table – reading the paper – while Tiffany made dinner. She started to hum softly. He lowered the paper and observed her.

'Are you happy?' he asked. Tiffany chuckled as if that was the funniest thing she'd ever heard.

'Of course,' she exclaimed. 'Aren't you?'


	5. Love me, just leave me alone

**Conversations between partners**

**Chapter 5: Love me, just leave me alone**

'_Got a crush?_ On Nick Dunne? Are you serious?' Rhonda seethed. Every step she took was more furious than the one before. Jim scrambled to keep up.

'It was just a joke! You're getting very worked up about nothing.'

'It's not nothing,' Rhonda snapped. 'It's the same kind of bullshit disguised as harmless jokes I have to deal with every day. I can take it from everyone else. But I thought that you were different, Gil. Better. I thought you were above these kinds of lame attempts to undermine me simply because…'

'You're much smarter than me,' Jim blurted out. Rhonda abruptly stopped and turned around right in front of their nondescript car. Jim almost bumped into her.

'You are much smarter than me,' he repeated. 'I couldn't undermine you even if I wanted to. And I don't want to. You're my partner.'

_Partner._ This time it sounded even less like a reasonable explanation. _Partner._ Rhonda was so close. _Partner._ One small step and he'd…

'Listen. Either you stop this or I'm gonna get you reassigned. I'm not your wife,' Rhonda pointed out. Jim chuckled.

'Wife. Partner. Sometimes I get them mixed up,' he quipped, pretending he hadn't been on the verge of kissing her.

'No, you don't.'

Slowly, Jim nodded. She was right, as always.

'No, I don't,' he agreed. 'Tiffany is supposed to be my other half, but you're the one who completes me.'

'Jesus,' Rhonda exclaimed. Jim couldn't figure out what that meant. Was she flattered? Not very likely. Was she amused by the corniness of the line? Probably. He took a step towards her. She smiled wryly, took a step back and shook her head.

'You don't want to do this. Because you're a nice guy and nice guys don't do this. Not without a massive amount of guilt and regret later,' she warned.

'I am in love with you,' Jim said.

'I know you are. I love you too,' Rhonda sighed, exasperated. It was a cooler response than he'd hoped for. Still, it contained the right words. She looked up at him as he approached her. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to kiss her so badly. But he could see that she didn't want him to, so he held back.

'I'm not doing this again. Especially not with a colleague who's twenty years my junior. I like having you as a partner, Gil. I really do, so… You're in love with me? That's fine, as long as you don't act on it. That's the deal. Okay?' Rhonda asked. There was a pleading look in her eyes that he hadn't seen before. It didn't matter how she felt; she clearly didn't want to do this. What could he do, except take her at her word and respect her wish?

'Okay.'


	6. Till we run out of road

**Chapter 6: Till we run out of road**

They met in a bar. Once upon a time, they used to do that regularly to discuss cases, but they hadn't done that for a while. Jim wondered what was different now. Rhonda didn't seem eager to tell him. She nursed her drink with a deep frown on her face.

He sipped his own beer and looked at other people. The shabby drunk in the corner. Two shifty looking guys playing darts. A group of possibly underage, giggling girls. Jim had thought that he knew people. Their motives, their desires, the way their minds worked. Recently, he had come to realise that he knew nothing. That people were entirely unknowable.

'Do you remember Nick and Amy Dunne?' Rhonda suddenly asked.

'Yeah, what about them?'

Rhonda's question had startled him, because it was Amy who had caused all his certainties to come down like the flimsiest house of cards. One glimpse into her psyche and – phoof! – everything he thought he knew about people had been dust in the wind. He was still recovering.

'He's going to kill her.'

For a second, Jim thought that it was a joke, but Rhonda's expression told him otherwise. He tried to wrap his head around this possible development and struggled.

'Well, that would be… I thought you told me that _she_ was the dangerous one?'

'She's backed him into a corner. Did you watch that interview where they announced her pregnancy? I bet you dollars to donuts he didn't sleep with her, Gil,' Rhonda asserted, leaning back and letting him draw his own conclusions. Nick wouldn't stay with Amy if it wasn't his child, Jim thought. But then, what?

'What are you saying? Is it like a, what's that tennis player called? Boris Becker. Is it that type of situation?'

Rhonda looked glad that he'd figured it out. She lowered her voice and continued to predict the future.

'My guess is that he'll wait until the baby is born and then Amy will go missing again. This time for good.'

Jim considered that. He could see it playing out like that. He could imagine Dunne slowly unravelling and planning Amy's demise. He could picture turning on the news and reliving the disappearance of Amy. He just couldn't see a role for Rhonda and him in this scenario.

'What are we going to do?' Jim pondered aloud. 'What _can _we do?'

Rhonda drained her bottle and shrugged.

'Catch him afterwards.'

He got both of them new drinks. When he came back, he slid her beer across the table. Rhonda scrutinised him as he twisted the cap off his bottle.

'There's a line,' she mused, catching his eye. Jim nodded.

'It's odd. Stay behind the line. Do not cross the line. I say that to people all the time. You do too,' he pointed out.

'There's a line,' Rhonda repeated.

'And we're about to cross it,' Jim said. Rhonda raised an eyebrow, but she appeared gratified.

'Is this a professional or a personal line?' he inquired.

'Both.'

'Good. Just checking to see if we're on the same page.'


	7. Till it feels like cheating

**Chapter 7: Till it feels like cheating**

They were in the car late at night. They were watching the Dunnes. Silhouettes behind curtains. They listened. The sound of a slamming door. They barely talked. Silences could last for hours. They were comfortable without saying anything. They didn't _need_ to speak. It was a form of escalation. Subtle, but they both knew.

'It's the sister who worries me,' Rhonda confided. 'The whole circus will start up again when Amy disappears. I don't believe that Nick will want to subject Margo to that.'

Yes, Jim thought, you could push and push and push and often nothing would happen. And then there was that one time when there seemed to be no pressure and the world changed in an instant. For better or worse, because it was naive to think that everything ended well. That only happened in books. Or maybe not even there.

He wouldn't know; he wasn't a big reader. Tiffany read a lot. Thrillers, detectives; the type of books that started with a body. He didn't get the appeal. Once, he'd tried to read one of Tiffany's favourites, but the book was wrong. It got everything wrong. It wasn't the details that bothered Jim – he could care less about the creative license writers took with DNA – it was the glamour.

Crime in general wasn't glamorous. It was dirty. From the motive to the deed to the covering up afterwards. It was usually boring and the rare times it was interesting you still kind of didn't want to know. Like Nick and Amy's marriage. That was fascinating stuff, for sure. Jim couldn't look away. But the impulse to avert his eyes was there. As if, if he wasn't there to witness it, those two fucked up people and a baby weren't going to lead to the beginning of a murder mystery.

What started out as a romance… Well, life had a way of switching genres when you least expected it to. Things didn't need to begin badly to end badly. Shit always happened along the way. The outcome was uncertain until you acted. Jim knew all this and he did it anyway.

In the car parked in front of the Dunne residence, with his knees just shy of bumping into hers, in darkness so complete as to be blinding, he leaned in and kissed the woman he loved. Because he wanted to know.

'Gil…' Rhonda whispered and then she kissed him back. That scared him. There's a fine line between caring and condescension, Rhonda had said. It sounded like something people said. Like, there's a fine line between love and hate. But how could there be? How could two opposites lay so close together?

For all their talk of lines, Jim hadn't understood, because a line was not a line until it was crossed. He thought about Tiffany now, at home, oblivious, while he was kissing someone else. He thought about Tiffany ever finding out. That did it.

'I can't, Rhonda.'

'You just did.'

'Which is how I know I can't.'

His heart ached when Rhonda accepted it with a nod, as if she had expected as much. They returned to their surveillance. Life went on.

(***)

It was disturbing to find out later that his life mirrored Nick's, who after killing his wife found out that he couldn't. Still, it was a happy ending in a way. At least their daughter wouldn't grow up with Nick and Amy as parents. On the other hand, Rand and Marybeth had raised Amy.

The end.


End file.
